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By: Morris Gleitzman

Location: FIC GLE

Genre: Birds, Fiction and Gleitzman

The people of the world are puzzled. Birds everywhere are sitting on highways, on buildings, on BBQs, stopping traffic, lawnmowers and leaf blowers. Then a boy and his pet budgie discover the secret to what the birds are up to. Jay and Clyde embark on an urgent journey – an exciting, emotional, sometimes hilarious, always risky journey with a message about the environment for humans. 

Elisha

This was a weird one.
It starts out from the POV of a pet budgie, which was fantastic. Eventually it adds in his child owner too, and we get their adventures through their eyes.
It’s part apocalypse, but also adventure and activism and secret agents and bad guys and defeating impossible odds, with some heartache and magical realism thrown in. Which is quite the combo.
But mostly it’s about the love of a boy called Jay and his budgie Clyde being stronger than anything else in the world.

Kathleen

This story could be really wacky, with the narrator being a little pet budgie called Clyde,
but it is simply delightful. His bird-brain view of humans and the world takes the reader into some serious matters but with an approach that saves it from getting heavy. We have themes such as standing together, environmental imbalance, and seeing things from a different perspective, and issues about who’s in control (us? our parents? the government?) and courage.

An excellent story.